Plastic Forms of a Horse · 4:26pm Sep 24th, 2023
I enjoyed watching Make Your Mark Chapter 5 this week. A set of cute stories about ponies helping each other out, nice things happening to Misty, and Opaline getting frustrated, was just what I needed. And there were plenty of interesting background details (the breezies are back!) I’ll start writing some more random physics-related commentary to all this shortly. But this week, let’s take a break from science and instead go into the world of avant-garde art.
On my summer travels, I popped into the Zurich Kunsthaus when I had a few hours to kill before taking a train to Paris. It had an impressive collection. Among all the stuff by Monet, Van Gogh, Rembrandt and others, there was an intriguingly-titled work by Italian Artist Umberto Boccioni: Forme plastiche di un cavallo (Plastic forms of a horse).
I am more familiar with plastic forms of a horse with brushable manes and tails. What is this crazy jolt of colour about?
Umberto Boccioni was a member of the Futurist art movement. In Italy, this is talked about as a movement of the same level of significance as the impressionists and cubists. Outside Italy it doesn’t get so much attention. For an explanation, I turn to Eva Montanari’s lovely book Chissà com’è il coccodrillo… (The crocodile’s true colors). This is a book to buy a young child if you want them to grow up to become an art historian. It tells a story where a class of little animals each try painting a crocodile in a different style.
A more grown-up summary can be found in the Oxford Dictionary of Art, which explains that Futurism was a movement that “exalted the dynamism of the modern word”, producing paintings with an “emphasis on conveying movement”, using techniques where, “forms are broken down into small patches of colour—suitable for suggesting sparkling effects of light or the blurring caused by high-speed movement.”
Boccioni is better known for his sculpture. His most noted is perhaps Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (Unique forms of continuity in space.)
He died in 1916, aged 33, after being thrown off a horse.
Interesting artist.
And that almost is a punchline, almost, at the end.
I hadn't heard of him before this, and I think that's a great shame. I really like these pieces. I'll have to look up more of his stuff!
Sounds like the horses had their revenge...
Clearly Celestia found her portrait unflattering.
Since he died in 1916 I assume that's "plastic" in the older sense of the word, meaning malleable or flexible. So, the incredible dexterity of a horse
I find it intresting that we have renowned pieces of Avant Guard Art done by Humans, but when AIs start creating distorted dijointed corrupted images due to only feeding off their own training data without filtering for runge spike extreme values or resetting through applying known measurements or observed data, we call it monstrous?
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Yes, I guess in the early days of bakelite, our normal interpretation of "plastic" did not yet apply. I think there may be a technical meaning to Italian artists that has been lost in translation. I've seen similar phrases on other artwork labels. Checking my Italian dictionary... si dice di un'opera in cui sono messe in evidenza le forme (It is said of a work in which the shapes are highlighted). Or see: https://tiacacademy.com/articles/2019/1/4/what-is-plasticity-and-why-does-it-matter
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There have been plenty of avant-garde works of art by humans that have been called monstrous.
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In the field of geology, plastic in the older meaning is well known:
Crystals are ridged. Minerals are crystalline. Rocks are made of crystals. One would expect rocks to be ridged; they are, on the surface of Earth:
When a liquid is very hot, it changes to a gas, but, if the pressure is too high, it cannot; so instead now, changes to a supercritical fluid, which penetrates like a gas, but into which substances dissolve like a liquid, making them perfect for decaffeination and drycleaning. Something similar happens to solids, under extreme heat and pressure:
The heat cause minerals to start to break down, but the pressure keeps them solid. Internally, the covalent and ionic bonds can shift, dislocate, relocate, break, and reform, while the minerals remain crystaling. As a result, rock in the mantle, made of crystalline minerals flows, although the minerals become amorphous solids with the same chemical formula as the minerals. One can see this in gneis:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Orthogneiss_Geopark.jpg
¡Gneis is nice!
The crystalline minerals deform plastically in the high temperature and pressure of the mantle of the Earth.
5747803 "You blind bastard, that looks nothing like me! Off!!"